Few people ventured below ground now, only the ingenieurs who maintained the vast subterranean reservoirs, the Priests and Priestesses of Elesstar who officiated at funeral rites, and the bereaved who, like herself, came to light candles at the memorial shrines. Only once a year was the Undercity filled with people – and that was the Day of the Dead.

As a child, Orial had never feared the dark. To her, the Undercity was a place of hidden wonders. She did not believe the stories of blood-sucking ghouls who haunted the shrines, looking for live victims. She had seen the occasional brown rat in her explorations… and that was all.

She had come to love the ancient wall-paintings that decorated the Undercity. She had spent hours gazing at the flaking colours applied by long-dead artists of the Lifhendil until she felt she knew the people pictured there almost as well as those in her everyday life above. She had even given them names, characters: this tall, dark-skinned young man, with fishing spear and tuft-eared hunting cat slinking at his heels, was Black Heron the Hunter; these two laughing girls, arms interlaced, were Ylda and Nanda, the best of best friends (Orial had always longed for a close companion of her own age but Papa had never encouraged it). The Lotos Princess, her favourite, sat singing and playing a gilded cithara to a rapt audience. The painter had depicted the irises of her eyes with exquisite attention to detail: even with the fading of the centuries, it was still possible to see in the splash of lamp-light the tiny brush-strokes of rose-pink, purple and gold flecking the blue.

Rainbow eyes.

Orial passed the Princess and her entourage and entered the vaulted hall of the Reservoir of Blue Dragonflies.

Tall fluted columns rose out of the deep waters to support the roof, each column carved with lotos leaves. And every wall was covered with a frieze of water-meadows and rushes.

The Lifhendil sense of perspective and scale was a little skewed here, Orial thought, for the sapphire-winged dragonflies that darted across the water-meadows were painted the same size as the slender men and women who were pointing to them. The Lifhendil had portrayed themselves as tall, elegant, slim-waisted. Men and women alike wore their hair long, bound back in elaborate fillets and ribboned braids. The coloured gauzes that draped their bodies were as vivid as the jewel-colours of the dragonflies: sky-azure, crimson-garnet, grass-green emerald.

As Orial passed by her fingers drifted over the inscriptions that bordered the friezes. The people who inhabited Sulien nowadays had no way of translating the unknown language of the Lifhendil. The names of the dead were lost. The purpose of the Undercity was unknown. Ancient artefacts were unearthed from time to time in back gardens or foundation trenches when new houses were being built – but nothing had yet been found to shed any light on the practices or beliefs of the city’s builders.